The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [87]
“I am the Buddha known as the Quitter.”
Then it would be when Japhy’s face would crease up in that funny littleboy laugh of his, like a Chinese boy laughing, crow’s tracks appearing on each side of his eyes and his long mouth cracking open. He was so pleased with me sometimes.
Everybody loved Japhy, the girls Polly and Princess and even married Christine were all madly in love with him and they were all secretly jealous of Japhy’s favorite doll Psyche, who came the following weekend real cute in jeans and a little white collar falling over her black turtleneck sweater and a tender little body and face. Japhy had told me he was a bit in love with her himself. But he had a hard time convincing her to make love he had to get her drunk, once she got drinking she couldn’t stop. That weekend she came Japhy made slumgullion for all the three of us in the shack then we borrowed Sean’s jalopy and drove about a hundred miles up the seacoast to an isolated beach where we picked mussels right off the washed rocks of the sea and smoked them in a big woodfire covered with seaweed. We had wine and bread and cheese and Psyche spent the whole day lying on her stomach in her jeans and sweater, saying nothing. But once she looked up with her little blue eyes and said “How oral you are, Smith, you’re always eating and drinking.”
“I am Buddha Empty-Eat,” I said.
“Ain’t she cute?” said Japhy.
“Psyche,” I said, “this world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.”
“Ah boloney.”
We ran around the beach. At one point Japhy and Psyche were hiking up ahead on the beach and I was walking alone whistling Stan Getz’s “Stella” and a couple of beautiful girls up front with their boyfriends heard me and one girl turned and said “Swing.” There were natural caves on that beach where Japhy had once brought big parties of people and had organized naked bonfire dances.
Then the weekdays would come again and the parties were over and Japhy and I would sweep out the shack, wee dried bums dusting small temples. I still had a little left of my grant from last fall, in traveler’s checks, and I took one and went to the supermarket down on the highway and bought flour, oatmeal, sugar, molasses, honey, salt, pepper, onions, rice, dried milk, bread, beans, black-eyed peas, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, coffee, big wood matches for our woodstove and came staggering back up the hill with all that and a half-gallon of red port. Japhy’s neat little spare foodshelf was suddenly loaded with too much food. “What we gonna do with all this? We’ll have to feed all the bhikkus.” In due time we had more bhikkus than we could handle: poor drunken Joe Mahoney, a friend of mine from the year before, would come out and sleep for three days and recuperate for another crack at North Beach and The Place. I’d bring him his breakfast in bed. On weekends sometimes there’d be twelve guys in the shack all arguing and yakking and I’d take some yellow corn meal and mix it with chopped onions and salt and water and pour out little johnnycake tablespoons in the hot frying pan (with oil) and provide the whole gang with delicious hots to go with their tea. In the Chinese Book of Changes a year ago I had tossed a couple of pennies to see what the prediction of my fortune was and it had come out, “You will feed others.